Her mobile phone trilled and she plunged her hand into her bag to locate it. A lipstick and a handkerchief emerged with it. The tiny folded triangle of cotton flew away on the breeze and Giles followed it, crouching like a hunter.
"Marian?" It was her researcher-secretary, Rose.
"Someone called Egan just rang.
Wonders whether he could snatch a moment with you this afternoon, around three?"
"Egan?"
"Sam Egan. Something to do with the Millennium Project work in the constituency. Egan Construction mean anything?"
"Yes, I know him. Did he say what he wanted?"
"No. Made it sound important."
Marian glanced at her watch.
"Tell him three-thirty. Meet him in Central Lobby, will you, Rose?
Thanks—" Giles had recovered the handkerchief.
"Anything important?"
"Nothing that will interrupt lunch."
"Good."
"Contractor on the fabled Millennium Urban Regeneration thing. Probably wants me to lobby for a bigger EU grant. Nothing unusual." She smiled.
"It won't put people out of work, at least!" Giles was studying her intently as he did habitually, like a doctor for the first signs of disease.
"Daddy," she warned.
"Sorry. Drink up I'm feeling more than a little peckish!"
He had mislaid the number of her mobile phone… mobile phone. He stared again at the phone that had been brought up to his office by one of the commission aires Someone had handed it in one of the men watching him after he had left it on a cafe table. It had terrified him. It was the Black Spot, he had tried — and failed to joke.
Evidently, it had been the excuse to discover his name, his function at the Commission. They knew he worked for the Transport Commissioner, Rogier, and that he had been spying on his own superior. That knowledge would be like a taunt, or the first step in a seduction which would madden and arouse. They would have to know his motive now.
Her home number answered his call, her voice on the answering machine.
This is Marian Pyott, lean't take your call at the moment but if… He waited for the extended, pinging tone, then said breathlessly:
"Sorry, Marian but they're on to me. Some people circling like sharks around that meeting, I don't know who. I'm back at the office now they've taken the trouble to find out who I am…" There seemed nothing he could add, however much he disliked the bleak promise of the facts.
"I–I'll call you again if I learn anything more… "Bye." He put down the receiver quickly.
He sat back from his desk, pushed his chair on its castors to the window. The rain had stopped and the Boulevard Charlemagne gleamed like a mirror. The Schuman station hunched at the end of the boulevard, shiny as a great snail shell. He sat near the window like a mockery of surveillance. How could he pick them out from this high vantage, how possibly?
He was no longer so afraid of them, now that they were again invisible, unidentifiable figures on the crowded streets or on the place in front of the Commission building the curving ugliness of which Marian Pyott had once described as the revenge of concrete on good taste. They were lost to him in the space down there, and he had been able to become calmer, even after the jolt of the phone being delivered to him, masquerading as his own.
Yet he knew no more clearly how to deal with the situation than he had done, stranded beneath the sodden umbrella at the cafe table. Knowledge
… but he had none. There was nothing lying carelessly on his Commissioner's desk, no cryptic indication in his appointments book, nothing that would suggest the need for the men who had had him under surveillance to provide a protective screen around the meeting. Their presence suggested secrecy, an added importance to what he had thought mere bribery, influence-seeking venality.
The men who had taunted him with white, waving hands had altered the construction, even the meaning, of the small drama he had created; they had acquired it, and made its plot cloudier but larger, its action more febrile and mysterious, its figures more sinister. It was as if he had set out to create a mocking little satire upon bureaucracy and they had insisted it become a drama of danger, threat. But he could not, simply could not, comprehend something that would unite the Commission and danger… It was a bad joke. He knew all those people at that meeting, for heaven's sake-!
He picked up the telephone and dialled the number of his flat — before remembering that Marie-Claire was already on her way to Rotterdam to report to Royal Dutch Shell on the lack of success of her lobbying at the Commission.
Brent Spar still floated on the company's horizon like a ship flying the skull and-crossbones, endangering image and sales alike. The Commission was sympathetic only in strict privacy, and was the colour of chlorophyll in all its public pronouncements. Lack of success was slowly driving his delectable partner up the proverbial wall.
He put down the receiver, then once more picked it up. The Commissioner's secretary answered.
"Michael," he said.
"M'selle Fouquet sorry about this, but the Commissioner asked me to research some background for' he hesitated momentarily, before reminding himself that they were already only too well aware of his un authorised interest "Aero UK, the British plane maker and and Mr. David Winterborne's companies." He lightened his voice.
"I think the Commissioner thinks they're lobbying too hard, m'selle. Do you have any idea how urgent it is?"
"A moment, M'sieur Lloyd." His charm was like thinly spread margarine when applied to Mile Fouquet. He heard her riffling pages.
"M'sieur Rogier is to be the guest of yes, David Winterborne at the family home this weekend. He did not tell you this? I presume he requires your work on his desk before he leaves on Friday. At midday."
As he replaced the receiver, he could not but laugh, even though the noise merely became the exhalation of nerves after a moment of amusement.
Rogier was meeting Winterborne again, in a few days' time. In England.
And he hadn't asked for a background briefing from his senior researcher, something the Frenchman was habitually punctilious about.
They joked among the Commission's junior ranks that Rogier required a detailed briefing before he used the toilet or took his next meal.
Secrecy again… David Winterborne. Was he the reason for the security screen? Why? As Chairman and CEO of Winterborne Holdings, a Singapore-based conglomerate, he was a major shareholder in Aero UK, in some of the subcontractors working on Skyliner — and on the helicopter and a prompt and determined lobbyist for EC funds on each and every possible occasion. And he was a friend of Marian's they'd practically grown up together. He was just another businessman.
Once more, he picked up the telephone. Her answer phone offered its assistance.
"Marian? Is there—?" No, that's not the question. Try again, Lloyd.
"Rogier is staying with David Winterborne this weekend. Mean anything?
Doesn't to me…"
He hesitated, then added: There's no reason for security, unless there's a hidden agenda and this isn't the usual bribery and corruption. Marian is David Winterborne a likely candidate? Your friend Winterborne, that is? Call me—" He put down the receiver, nerved by a sense of activity and insight. He was intrigued; curiosity masked fear, for the moment, and offered him a return of confidence.
Marian's question returned to his mind, together with the sensation that when he had left that message for her the previous day, he had almost believed the supposition that lay behind it. Perhaps this…? The actors in the scene at the hotel were, indeed, the necessary cast for such a play. He scribbled their names on his legal pad. Rogier Transport, he underlined. Laxton Urban Development, a former Cabinet middleweight now punching above his talents in Brussels. The Euro MP, Campbell, Winterborne, Coulthard, Bressier from Balzac-Stendhal, his deputy… which meant Skyliner had to be the subject under discussion… Urban Development, funds for rundown regions, for grandiose renewal projects those in Italy and Spain notoriously corrupt, acting like desert sand on EC funds. Marian had asked speculated — whether funds could be diverted, moved by disguise to the Sky-liner project… The cast for the proposed play stared back at him in his large, untidy handwriting.